Picture Perfect

Here's your nightly math! Just 5 quick minutes of number fun for kids and parents at home. Read a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in. Your kids will love you for it.

Picture Perfect

When people snap a really awesome photo, they want to show it off to everyone. That’s why people now load millions of photos a day onto the Internet through their phones and computers. People couldn’t have cranked out so many pictures back in 1826, when the first picture ever was taken. That poor camera had to sit for 8 hours to let in enough light to make the photo – and it still came out pretty blurry, as we see here. Now people worldwide snap more photos in 2 minutes than were taken through the whole 1800s! That’s partly because there are so many ways to take pictures, not just with cameras but with cellphones, iPads and other gadgets. By next year half of all pictures will be taken from phones — and we’re guessing those guys from 1826 would have been jealous. They didn’t even have phones yet!

Wee ones: If you take a picture of each person in your family other than you, how many pictures do you take?

Little kids: The biggest one-piece photo ever taken was 32 feet tall by 111 feet wide! People coated a giant piece of cloth with chemicals and hung it in a big empty building with a small hole in one wall. If that photo is just 1 foot taller than your house, how tall is your house? Bonus: If a tree in the photo was 10 feet shorter than the whole photo, how tall was that tree picture?

Big kids: Even though a camera can take zillions of photos, some people like to have more than one camera – like Dilish Parekh, who has a record-busting 4,425 cameras. If he collects 111 more this year, how many will he have? Bonus: If he took just 20 photos on each of his current cameras, how many pictures would that add up to?

Answers:Wee ones: Different for everyone – count as many cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles as you want!

About the Author

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking before she could walk, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.